French cosmetics and beauty products giant L'Oréal knew that its global enterprise-to-shop floor integration project wasn't going to be easy. After all, it named the initiative after the Egyptian goddess Isis who suffered mythical travails - she found her husband's body parts scattered about and then reassembled him.

Like Isis, L'Oréal some six years ago found a disjointed corpus - its own globally disparate and unconnected legacy systems. Rather than stitching together the existing parts, the 100-year-old maker of Garnier, Giorgio Armani, Lancôme, Matrix, Redken and Ralph Lauren brands envisioned a whole new anatomy: a single, integrated system that would allow it to track its production and run its design and supply chain initiatives in a consistent manner around the world. The idea was to cut costs, respond to market and supply fluctuations, ensure quality, and answer to regulators equally in all countries.

The result was Isis, which stands for Integrated Solution for Industrial Systems.

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